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In an article appearing in The Hill and which is also due to be published in the April 4 Immigration Daily issue, legal expert Nolan Rappaport suggests that the mayors of Chicago and some other Sanctuary Cities might arguably be subject to federal prosecution under a statute (INA Section 274) which makes it a federal crime to "harbor" or "assist" immigrants staying in the US illegally.

If Nolan, for whom i have the highest respect as a legal scholar, wishes to crank up this statute in order to prosecute anyone who "assists" an unauthorized immigrant without checking his or her documents first, something which could in theory put tens of millions of American citizens in jail and take this country down the road which led to Nazi Germany, I would suggest looking into another area where prosecution might turn out to be more in the interests of protecting the American people if the allegations are shown to be true.

I refer to the late breaking buzzfeed story that a former Trump adviser allegedly may have met with a Russian spy.

I do not agree with your analysis at all. I have more immigration clients coming to me now. So that is a very good thing for my practice. They are cracking down on convicted criminal illegal aliens, which is better for everybody.

Are there developing signs of reason and flexibility coming from Donald Trump?

There were two major developments today, August 5. First Bannon is now out as a National Security Council member.

This is a big demotion for the most dangerous person in the entire Trump administration.

Second was Trump's strong condemnation of Assad's gas attack against Syrian civilians.

This ia a welcome, if overdue reaction and it could signal that the president might be more inflienced by humanitarian considerations, at least on this issue, than many of us have been prone to believe.

Let us see what, if anything, Trump will actually do to change his policies toward Syria, toward Assad's main supporter, Vladimir Putin, and toward Syrian refugees.

No regular reader of Immigration Daily will ever mistake me for a Trump supporter or apologist. But Trump has shown a great deal of courage and wisdom in his airstrikes against Syria's dictator Assad for Assad's monstrous crimes against humanity in using chemical weapons against his own people.

Trump did this even though it was certain to provoke the ire of his sometime idol, Russia's' Vladimir Putin, alleged ties to whom Trump's White House is now under FBI investigation.

Now, all we are waiting for is for Trump to scuttle his ban on refugees and start letting a reasonable number (at least 100,000 to begin, I suggest) of the victims of Assad's inhuman regime, namely Syrian refugees, into the United States, consistent with America's moral and legal obligations under international law.

If Trump does not move promptly to open America's doors to the living survivors of Assad's Russian-backed war crimes, even as he retaliates for the atrocities against those who have already been killed, we will be seeing and hearing the word "hypocrite" , derived from the ancient Greek word for "actor" ("hypo-cri-tes") about his hostility toward refugees more and more.

And that may be one of the kinder words that history may have to say about Donald Trump, just as history condemns the American politicians who gave into (or even exploited) popular hatred against Jewish refugees by barring America's gates to those trying to flee the holocaust, resulting in even more deaths in Hitler's ovens and gas chambers.